Lord Krebs (CB)

My Lords, I rise to speak very briefly to Motion K1. I join others in thanking the Minister for her statement from the Dispatch Box, which meets many of the concerns we had, and for the time she and other Ministers spent discussing this with us. I just wanted to allude to one part of her statement, on the development of guidance. A lot of the devil will be in the detail of how builders actually receive guidance and respond to it. One is particularly concerned about small builders, who do not have a legal team to interpret the guidance or spend a lot of time trying to understand it. My noble friend Lady Willis and I have spent quite a lot of time trying to understand how the pieces of the jigsaw fit together: the habitat regulations, the nature restoration fund, the EDPs and the biodiversity net gain requirements. We have produced our own flow chart, the Minister has provided flow charts, and we are still somewhat in the dark. It is of course possible that the combined brains of two Oxford professors are not enough to tackle the complexity of this matter, but we have given it quite a lot of effort. Therefore, I very much welcome the Minister’s stating she will involve us both in helping to simplify the guidance in a way that will actually make it useful and practically helpful to builders and developers, particularly those running small businesses.